Larry David

Yes, it’s finally here. By now, you’ve probably seen the commercials billing The Hurt Locker as the year’s most acclaimed film to date – no exaggeration, given its enviable score on the all-important Tomatometer – and after two weeks in limited release, it opens in the Bay Area today. Along with Food, Inc., it ranks as the very best of the films currently in rotation at an indie theater near you.

With Frameline receding into the rearview and the Jewish Film Festival (July 23-Aug. 10) fast approaching, summer remains a busy time for Bay Area cinephiles. As always, here's a list of some of the finest films currently in rotation at a San Francisco indie theater near you.

Joined by festival co-founder Robert De Niro and current leading man Larry David, Woody Allen opened the Tribeca Film Festival last Thursday with Whatever Works, a wry romantic comedy starring David and San Francisco International Film Festival honoree Evan Rachel Wood.

Hyperbole runs rampant in the entertainment industry, but it’s hardly effusive to call Woody Allen a living legend.

At 72, the Brooklyn-born director of Annie Hall and Manhattan has received 21 Oscar nominations during his four-plus decades behind the camera, taking home the statuette three times. He has expanded his canon at the astonishing rate of a movie each year since 1992, and his latest, the remarkable romantic comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona, won an Academy Award nomination for Penélope Cruz. In short, he has earned his place in the fraternity of the finest filmmakers of any era: among them, Fellini, Scorsese and the man Allen once described as “the great cinematic poet of morality,” Ingmar Bergman.